Once, when I was home, my father told me: You have the bloodof 100,000 innocent Iraqis on your hands. This was confusing
because when I was twenty-one and flying into Harare,
he said that it would be better to join the army.
But I didn't, and I didn't understand the change of heart:
his slip between 'we're-all-in-this-together' and
'you're-here-on-your-own.' That evening I saw
a snake contorting itself around itself
over and over. Quickly, I warned my neighbor,
but she said she had already seen it. It had been
poisoned in her garage, and she had tossed it
over the fence into our yard. I wanted to ask
why she didn't lie when she had the chance,
it would have been easy enough, the right thing to do,
better than pretending the snake wasn't
a living thing dying in front of me, better than
admitting she had chosen our yard for that.
But I didn't ask her, I just nodded
and steered the mower in a wider perimeter
around the snake's seizing body.